Emotion in Decisions of Life and Death – Its Role in Brain-Body-Environment Interactions for Predator and Prey

Taking inspiration from the biological world, in our work we are attempting to create and examine artificial predator-prey relationships using two LEGO robots. We do so to explore the possible adaptive value of emotion-like states for action selection in this context. However, we also aim to study and consider these concepts together at different levels of abstraction. For example, in terms of individual agents’ brain-body-environment interactions, as well as the (emergent) predator-prey relationships resulting from these. Here, we discuss some of the background concepts and motivations driving the design of our implementation and experiments. First, we explain why we think the predator-prey relationship is so interesting. Narrowing our focus to emotion-based architectures, this is followed by a review of existing literature, comparing different types and highlighting the novel aspects of our own. We conclude with our proposed contributions to the literature and thus, ultimately, the design and creation of artificial life.